In short
Podcast Summary: Modern Wisdom - Episode #665 with Cory Clark
Episode Overview
- Title: 5 Forbidden Topics That Psychology Won’t Discuss
- Guest: Cory Clark, Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, social psychologist, and author.
- Focus: Exploration of controversial topics in psychology that are often avoided or censored due to societal pressures and biases.
Key Themes and Discussions
- Myths of Misogyny
- Pervasive Misogyny: Cory challenges the notion of widespread misogyny, suggesting that biases in favor of women are more prevalent in modern Western societies.
- Cultural Observations: Anecdotal evidence is shared about experiences of misogyny in different cultural contexts, such as Cairo, compared to the U.S.
- Research Findings: Studies indicate that women often receive favorable treatment over men in various domains, including academia and hiring practices.
- Gender Bias in Academia
- Self-Censorship: Conducting studies on gender bias can lead to retaliation in academic circles.
- Cultural Shift in Academia: Women’s increasing presence in academia has led to a shift in priorities, favoring protective measures for vulnerable groups at the potential cost of scientific truth.
- Pressure on Research: The fear of backlash can silence research that does not align with popular narratives, particularly those that could be perceived as anti-female.
- Academic Freedom vs. Social Equity
- Conflict Between Truth and Morality: Respondents to surveys show that while most support academic freedom, many still prioritize social equity over the pursuit of truth.
- Preference Falsification: There is a prevalence of individuals publicly adopting views that align with social expectations while privately holding different beliefs about controversial topics.
- The Role of Evolutionary Psychology
- Rejection of Controversial Findings: There is significant resistance to findings from evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, particularly when they favor men or reveal uncomfortable truths about gender differences.
- Protection of Underrepresented Groups: The current academic climate often leads to the suppression of research that could potentially reinforce negative stereotypes or biases against underrepresented groups.
- Societal Implications
- Infantilizing Attitudes: The tendency to treat certain groups as fragile or incapable of handling criticism is critiqued.
- The Dangers of Oversensitivity: Cory argues that avoiding uncomfortable truths in the name of protecting feelings could ultimately cause greater harm by distorting reality and impeding scientific progress.
Key Takeaways
- Changing Dynamics in Academia: As women gain representation in academia, the discourse and priorities shift, often prioritizing emotional safety over objective truths.
- Censorship vs. Freedom of Speech: A significant divide exists between men and women regarding attitudes towards academic freedom and the importance of protecting vulnerable groups.
- Personal Responsibility in Discourse: Both Cory and the host stress the importance of speaking out against prevailing narratives that may distort or suppress scientific inquiry and truth.
Final Thoughts Cory Clark's insights challenge prevailing narratives about gender bias and university culture, urging a reevaluation of how academic pressures inform the pursuit of knowledge. This episode serves as a call for greater intellectual honesty and transparency in the face of societal expectations.
Additional Resources
- Cory Clark’s Website: [Cory J. Clark](http://coryjclark.com)
- Follow on Social Media: Twitter and Instagram handle: @hard_corey
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This summary captures the essence of the discussion held in the podcast, highlighting critical viewpoints and encouraging reflection on important issues surrounding gender bias, academic freedom, and the implications of evolving cultural values in academia.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Is pervasive misogyny a myth? I have claimed that it is Yeah, I think I Don't want to say it was necessarily always a myth I just before we got in here was talking about how I was treated in Cairo. Yeah, tell a story Oh I was just at the airport and I was getting on to an elevator I was there first I hit the button. I started to step on and these two guys walk up and they're like no No, and they waived to me to get off and then I got off and they got on and they went up and I had to take the next one So that kind of thing exists in places in the world still in 2023 But in the US You're not getting much of that anymore and in fact you're getting quite a bit of the opposite So I wrote this paper.
0:48I think this is a sequel at article. I think yeah year or two ago, that reviewed a lot of the recent research on looking at gender biases in psychology. And a lot of the time you see exactly the opposite. So people are biased in favor of women across a lot of different means. They often treat women better than men. They like women better than they like men. Women get punished less than men for the same things. when there's a scientific finding that portrays men better than women, people are biased against it in relation to scientific evidence that portrays women better than men, so people want women to be better than men.
1:28And so this idea that society is sexist against women and we have to be vigilant about potential harm to women, I think potentially actually stems from the very fact that we care so much more about women than we do about men. And when we discover these biases against men, no one really cares and they don't make the headlines. So yeah, I would say it is largely a myth in modern Western societies, yes. Is it really possible to answer this question about whether society is more biased against men than women? That's a good question and I would say I probably know, like practically, it would be really hard to measure all of the different contexts where people potentially could be biased.
2:21So like some scholars have looked at potential bias against women in academia and they see, for example, it's possible students are slightly biased against women and they're teaching evaluations, although hard to know because a lot of these are real evaluations. So it could just be that with maybe women or has nice t -shirts. I don't know. So people have tried to like look at which domains do people have a bias against women or against men. It would be hard to look at everything all at once and say which direction. But one thing that's been happening that I've seen across a few papers now, including one of my own papers that's coming out, is that a lot of these biases actually used to favor meant, like for example, in hiring for male stereotypical jobs, it really was the case that people used to be discriminating against women in those jobs.
3:10And a lot of these things seem to have flipped around 2009. So a lot of the biases that used to favor men, now favor women. And a lot of the biases that always favor women, still favor women. So I do think, I don't know if we can say on whole who gets treated worse relative to the other gender. But certainly it seems to be the trajectory that biases are increasingly in favoring women. And then people just don't seem to care as much about that as when they seem to go against women. Do as that steves to you at William's study about fake articles favoring women or men and people's judgments of it, right?
3:48Mm -hmm. Yeah, they had one on, I think it was men or women lie more maybe, and then they did men or women are more intelligent or men women are better drawers. I think they're like three domains. And yeah, they always found that when that when the evidence said that women have a worse quality than men, people like this is sexist, this is bad research. But when women are portrayed as better people, yeah, it's even pretty good. And that was the same as when it was equal, right? So women Women are better and men and women are equal, was seen as a similar level, I think. So I have studies where I've looked at something very similar that I have struggled to publish for like seven years where we did that.
4:30We had men, I think we did it with intelligence. Men are women are equally intelligent, women are more intelligent than men are more intelligent than women. And people like the men and women are equally intelligent or women are more intelligent than men more than they like men are more intelligent than women. So that's the one that really irritates people. Yeah. Why do you think this is the case? Like, why is it? Well, actually first, no, why do mainstream narratives focus so much on the possibility of anti -female biases if it seems, you know, pretty robust that men even have an anti -men bias.
5:06They do. Like the call is coming from inside the house with regards to some of the sort of anti -male sentiments. Yeah, so like both men and women will show this pro female bias. It is larger for females usually, but men too have these pro women pre pro women bias. What was your question? Why the mainstream narrative focus on it so much? Oh, yeah, I think I think it's potentially just because we care more about so, okay, so there are two things going on, I think. And one I think has been sort of forwarded as the explanation, but I think it might be a little bit simplistic. So just the idea that men and women have more like value essentially from an evolutionary perspective.
5:48If you have 100 women and one men, one man, one man, you could have 100 babies. But if you have one woman, very happy man. If you have one woman and 100 men, you have one. You have a very disgusting woman. Yeah, exactly. So women are the limited resource. And so scholars have argued, and it seems to be very plausible that we care more about harm to women because they are essentially setting the limit on our success as a species. So that's one piece of it. The reason that I don't think that's necessarily all of it is what we briefly touched on at the start of this conversation, which is that you do see these big cross -cultural differences And you do see these big differences over time.
6:35So if I were to run this study where I say men are smarter than women or women are smarter than men. In like 1920, when I see the same thing, I highly doubt it. So I don't think that's all of it. I think that's part of it. And then on top of it, we have this sort of cultural narrative that women have been disadvantaged for X amount of time. And that is a huge problem. And now the corrective measures have gone so far that they fully reverse things and a lot of time men are being disadvantaged for the sake of women. So I think those are both what's happening. So you see that in society when you get any of these effects where you're like, look people are sexist against women.
7:15Everyone loves it. You know, it goes viral. It's covered by the New York Times. I don't think anybody will be, well, I don't want to say anybody but I don't know if Steve's due, Steve's through at Williams findings are going to make it to the front page of the New York Times. I guess we'll see. Are you familiar with Gamma bias, if you learned about this. I don't know, I don't think so. So this is Dr. John Barry from the Center for Male Psychology. This is a concept that he at least has popularized. I don't know whether he was the one that came up with it. It basically talks about how, especially in popular news media articles, if the article is pro women, then they will sex the headline.
7:50If it's anti -men, then it will sex the headline. But if it's the reverse, it will be gender neutral. So basically the successes of women and the failings of men both end up getting so like white male shooter Would be put as the headline for something or like female CEO Would be put as the headline for something but the reverse isn't necessarily true It seems to be less true and this causes a skew in the way that people see the world You know more people are spending time inside rather than outside now, which means that their genuine day -to -day experience of the world is limited So most of them live their life vicariously through the new stories that they read and the social media that they follow, which means that this very much is shaping our experience of the world.
8:36I think Q1 2023 saw the highest ever number of female CEOs in history happen. It was over a third of all CEOs were women remembering that this isn't just like like finally women have got the opportunity to do this. This is like finally we have found enough women that want to become CEO for all that it sounds great and like 50, 50 rappers. It, the reality on the ground probably sucks a lot more dick than you think. So, but you also found looking at this, this issue that psychology academics also have this bias too. Jedi? Yeah, the Jewish, wasn't it that people have like a stronger desire to sense a science that disfavours women?
9:22Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's in my right, yeah, where I surveyed psychology professors. Well, first I interviewed them and I asked them, you know, this was, this was from forever ago. This was, I think you must have found the teaser that maybe got you onto this track originally because this was way before you started this study. Unless you were doing that study like two or three years ago when you wrote that will that article? I probably what or I possibly was was that my own researcher was at someone else's research. I'm not sure. What you had was an inclination, I think, that both the way that the general public and the way that the people doing the science that the general public sees, everybody is kind of aware of this.
10:06Like, you know, both men and women seem to have a pro -female bias when it comes to the way they interpret stuff. That boundary doesn't stop outside of academics and academia that seeps into academia too, the difference being that academia is upstream of these realizations. So there are academics who are concerned about that. Okay, so we've like danced around what's going on. What is your explanation for why this is happening? Not why mainstream media focuses on it. Like, why is it the case that this is the interpretation? that the interpretation is that the world is sexist against women. Yeah.
10:45Yeah. Motivated reasoning. I don't know. There are a couple things. I mean one is just what I mentioned before is that we do have this greater concern for women. There's this cultural shift and part of that cultural shift is driven by the fact that women now, as you mentioned, I don't know, they're more in positions of power. And so their interests, the interests of women have more power in institutions. They probably, I mean, if women are taking over the media, they're taking over science, they're taking over all of these positions. And they're particularly concerned about their own interests.
11:20They're going to focus on that, even as the problem disappears over time. But as you said, there's also this actual, I think, sincere but incorrect belief about the problem. So in this paper that we should have hopefully getting accepted any day now, we had academics and everyday people estimate discrimination against men and women in hiring contexts in these audit studies where you're randomly sending in job applications to real jobs with like a female or a male name. And as I said, we see this flip around 2009 where all the sudden, even for male stereotypical jobs, the biases favor women. They've always favored women for female stereotypical jobs.
12:09But among everyday people and academics alike, everyone assumes it's the opposite. They assume that there's this huge bias against women and hiring for male stereotypical jobs. So they think like they look at just the under representation of women and STEM and say well there can be only one explanation obviously we're discriminating against women and STEM and it's not maybe women don't want to go into STEM maybe they like other things more. So you know there's that tendency to see if there's a disparity and we know that historically women have discriminated, been discriminated against that that must be the best and the only explanation in fact.
12:47And so it's this combination of like whose, whose in power, so those people's interests are like starting to have a greater impact on public narratives in the media and academia. But also I just think there's this misperception about what's actually happening that that maybe it's driven by what you say what the media are covering. Maybe it's willful ignorance. I don't know. I think that definitely a part of it is there's no associated social renown or goodwill for anybody that starts really applauding men doing well as the eos. There's no victimhood card carrying points available for somebody that decides to do that because fuck you, this is no surprise to anybody.
13:35Like, you know, even taking it from a straight up structural perspective, headlines that are counter -insuitive or at least sound counter -insuitive are the ones that are the most interesting. So why are we going to report on a news story that most people already thought was happening? So you kind of have this public conceptual inertia that most people think the world is one particular way. That means that when stories appear that confirm the world view that they thought they had, they get brushed under the rug. Why should we be bothered about celebrating the number of men becoming CEOs of guys doing whatever, whatever, because this is the way it's always been, because they don't know that there may be some shift in the other direction, which would make now the intuitive counter -intuitive again.
14:19So it's almost like there's a mismatch between what's actually happening and what the press is releasing and what the public believes. but you know and this is not to castigate women. It's not like women are choosing to make this like misandr I don't think almost any women are choosing. Yeah well what do you think I can see why some women would maybe have this sort of misandrist or desire to be to continue to castigate men. You had this quote a Google scholar search for misogyny yielded 114 ,000 results, whereas a search for misundry yielded only 2340. So people are not studying or really concerned about anti -male bias, especially from women.
15:04And it's the same as the, like, camp -black people be racist. Question. It's like, no, of course they can't. Like, racism is power plus privilege, given that women are the ones who have been out of power for so long. There is no way that they could be. I bet that if you did on street interviews, or you surveyed people saying, like, can women be sexist? That it would yield very, very similar results. I think that's probably true. There's actually an even better Google result that I think I didn't find until after I wrote that paper. But I had Google imaged men are stronger than women, which is just empirically correct on average.
15:38And not even on average. It's just the rate almost exclusively. Yeah. Barely, barely in overlap. But of the like 41st images that popped up on the screen, I think like one of them was yes, confirming that and then there were like two neutral and all the rest right images of men being stronger than men. So women running faster than men, women like raising a man over her head, you know? And so even when you Google this fact when you're stronger than women, everyone's like, No, we're not the struggle in Matt. There was a football game that happened a couple of weeks ago in the UK. I can't remember the team, but they got the B squad of some fourth division British team to play, I think, the US women's team.
16:30And they beat them, I want to say, like 12, nil or 14, nil in the space of 25 minutes. And then the best presentation, I think, of speed and power, the disparity between men and women is the women's 100 meter record. So the women's 100 meter record that hasn't been beaten in a want to say 20 or 30 years is held by like 100 or 200 under 18 males. Like high school level males hit that female number but that's because of socialization as we all know. But yeah, there have been a couple of cases where they try to get these professional female athletes leads to play, yeah, like low tier men's teams and...
17:12Doesn't go well. Simparison. Does it go well? It's a little embarrassing. Yeah, but if you were to do, if there was... Is that embarrassing like necessarily, but it is just because we're in denial of this reality for whatever reason. If you were to do a game of a liar detection or turning over cards on a table and having to remember the position of them all, if that had happened to become a globally recognized sport for some reason. Women would wipe the floor with men. We would be like, this is completely unfair. We can't have a mixed co -ed team of this because for some reason, all of the top players happen to be women because they - Are we better at that game?
17:50I don't know. I thought it called local specialization or local specialization or something like that. I've heard that, but I didn't know it translated to that game, but I guess that makes sense. That's the only thing that I can think of that's like a modern equivalent of it. Either that are losing your keys in the kitchen. That you know, like every guy loses the keys, but every woman knows exactly where they are. But if the guy then went to throw the keys to the woman like she's not catching them. You meant to be like looking at an object and be like, where's my ex? Yeah, precisely correct. Yeah, precisely correct.
18:18Okay, so we've kind of got a bit of a story going on here. We've set up this disparity between what people think is happening in the world and what might actually be happening some anti -female, anti -male, pro -male, anti -female bias. there's also moving into higher education, a lot more women who are going into higher education, not only as students, but also as academics too. How has this changed academic culture? Yeah, so if you look at the trajectories of women in academia, if you look for men and women, if you look at men, I think it actually goes ever so slightly up, but for women, it's like huge.
18:56You know, they were a very, very small minority decades ago, not even all that long ago, but in the past few years, women are dominating at the undergraduate level, way more women than men. There are more women in graduate school, and now there are actually more women who are faculty as well. So you went from an institution that was run almost entirely by men, and the people in the institution were almost all men, too, because the students were men, too. And now it's a majority of women. And I think, I don't want to say it's the only cause. I don't think it is the only cause. But I do think it is probably a primary contributor to a lot of the cultural shifts that have been happening in the past 10 years because they all prioritize the values of women.
19:44So if you look at stuff, for example, people wanting to do these trigger warnings when they're teaching topics in class, If you look at the cases of scholars getting attacked or fired or harassed on social media for studying potentially controversial topics, those are sky -racketing. If you look at these editorial changes in academic journals, which maybe some of your listeners won't be familiar with, but there have been some of the most prominent or most prestigious journals in all of science of the Nature, Spring, or Family of Journals that have put out a series of editorials over these past few years saying that they would not publish and potentially would retract science that has like potential to I think one of the phrasing was undermine the dignity of human social groups whenever that means.
20:39And so it's all of these like harm concerns and these concerns about protecting vulnerable people that are starting to interfere with a process that at least at one point was supposed to be, well, we're gonna pursue the truth. You know, if it hurts some people's feelings, you know, that's so be it, that's not what we're concerned with, we're concerned with, you know, finding out what is empirically correct about the world and sharing that information with our students. And so if you look at all these, and then the growing, the bloated DEI, what do you call it? Initiative. Initiative divisions, whatever they have these universities, all of these things are, they all kind of concerned the things that women would be worried about.
21:27And so you're getting this exact pattern happening at the same time women are essentially taking over academia and now they're probably holding more positions of power. They're the editors at these journals. They're the presidents of the professional societies.
21:46They're the of academia and people are so perplexed by it, but it seems like a pretty simple straightforward solution. I'm not saying that's the only thing. Maybe social media has something to do with it, you know, scientists are directly like interacting with the public. So maybe the public gets pissed about a scientific finding where it's 15 years ago. They probably didn't even know we had academic journals. So that could be part of it. But yeah, I think the changing the composition, the gender composition of academia, I think pretty much has inevitable consequences that are going to prioritize the interests of women, which are to protect the vulnerable from harm.
22:25And they're also way more egalitarian. So they want everyone to kind of have the same outcomes, whereas men are more hierarchical, they're more comfortable with like some people are going to be better at things than other people and those people are going to get benefits for that. I've known women, you know, I know a lot of women in academia, and a lot of them are like pained by the process of grading. Like they don't want to give anyone a D, which I get, like it's not fun, failing a student. But that's kind of part of the process. If you just give everyone a nae is sort of loses its meaning, but that's painful to women to not have everyone be thriving equally all the time.
23:05Can you explain for the people who are uninitiated, can you explain the driver evolutionarily about why women have this more egalitarian, more sort of cloak and dagger behind closed doors approach to things and the opposite for men. Yeah, so women, essentially women were having children and raising them to be successful adults that have children of their own, whereas men were often working in coalitions to protect the group. So men are used to creating coalitions, figuring out who's a good leader, who's good at what, giving that person status to make sure the group works really well together. So they're very comfortable with the fact that some men are going to rise to the top because that benefits the whole group.
23:53If we have a strong leader, we all live. Women were not participating in that so much. They were being protected by the men and their primary job was to care for offspring and keep offspring alive. So they have this concern for things that are vulnerable and they want to protect them and help them. Um, yeah, the, I, I think it's actually sort of an interesting discussion about like, is it that men are hierarchical or women egalitarian because it might just be that the egalitarian thing could have been the default, but men are the ones that had to change because they had to coordinate and cooperate in this way.
24:32Oh, yeah. Who's the evolution? Who's the, I don't know. So like, I think, and I think that explanation, it's almost like the absence of women participating participating in that potentially made them more egalitarian, but it also could have been because they're sharing resources with other women and helping other women take care of their children, too, where you wouldn't necessarily need. They tend to be in small groups, prefer a few close friends rather than being in this huge group of people that's really coordinated and trying to outcompete other groups. Well, Joyce Benenson has done so much good work on this where she looked at, is it female basketball teams and I think male opposition, male opponents on a basketball court show more goodwill physically to each other than female compatriots.
25:25So like the enemies on the men's teams, they show more love to each other than the same team, the same team members for women. And I tell me if I'm wrong here, I'm pretty sure that another contributing reason is that women physically are more fragile, which means that getting, becoming the enemy of anybody has high consequences. You are physically less capable of defending yourself, plus you eventually have dependence on you, children, so on and so forth. So the ex -analytomy of you dying, like, man dies, not good, but like, you know, things can continue because he's been gawed by a fucking mammoth or something.
26:03A woman gets too high above her station, She pisses off the wrong other woman and that woman Poisoned her in a sleep or takes a child away from her or does something else to cause her to Lower down in status which means that women seem to hide their own successes I think this is is born out of the way that girls in school talk about Achieving a grades and b grades and c grades that they're much more disparaging of their own achievements They will underplay their own achievements a lot more. It's the same thing of If a girl thinks that her results are going to be viewed by other people, she's much more likely to downplay her successes, whereas if she thinks that they're going to be kept private, they'll be a little bit more accurate or full of themselves in their assessments.
26:50So that's another sort of contributing factor too. I wasn't aware of that last one, but yeah, there are pretty consistent gender differences where like men have more self -esteem than women, women tend to underestimate how well they're doing at things and men tend to overestimate how well they're doing. Fuck yeah, being a body. Well, how beneficial is it? And yeah, as you said, I mean, I don't even necessarily think it's just women on women. Women are vulnerable around men, too. And so I think that there's more pressure to be a conformist when you're a woman. Because as you said, you don't want to piss anyone off because you're not particularly strong.
27:25And so if someone attacks you, there's a good chance you're going to get injured or die. Whereas men are more capable of defending themselves. And they're completely capable of defending themselves against almost all women. So their like enemies are cut in half or rather the threats are cut in half as it were. So yeah, there are a lot of these like correlated gender differences that if you look at them like on their own the differences don't appear huge when it comes to personality. But the fact that you get them across all of these different kinds of things like the egalitarianism and the harm concern that I think the pressure to be to conform to your social group when all of those things are correlated, you end up with these pretty big differences.
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28:07And then we see these differences in the priorities of men and women. So among psychology professors, men are more supportive of pursuit of truth as like the purpose of science than women are. They're more supportive of academic freedom than women are. Whereas women think we need to be balancing these things with moral concerns and harm concerns. So you get these evolved gender differences between men and women, their personality, and And then you change the gender composition of an institution and it can fundamentally change the goal of what that institution is trying to accomplish in the case of science, like truth, so long as it doesn't cause any mean stereotypes to be spread about it.
28:48Yeah, I've got some of my favorite stats that you've found during your research. 56 % of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas. 64 % of women said that they should. 50 -1 % of men said colleges should not disinvite speakers if students threaten violent protest, 67 % of women said that they should. 58 % of men opposed a confidential reporting system at colleges, which students could use to report offensive comments. 54 % of women supported it. 63 % of men thought controversial news stories in student newspapers should not need administrators approval before publication.
29:2351 % of women thought that they should. And it just continues down, whether it's about willingness to report male counterparts for dismissal campaigns, 71 % of men reported that protecting free speech is more important than promoting an inclusive society, 60 % of women said that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech, although I don't. Then you summarise it really, really nicely here. Put simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable. Yeah, what I love about all of those numbers too is because they so clearly show what happens when you change the majority representation in an institution because in all of those cases, it's the majority of men hold view A and the majority of women hold view B.
30:10So whichever group has more people, they're going to be the ones whose priorities went. Right. We call it like the the academic ratio hypothesis. Yeah, we could. And I mean, I haven't actually gotten much pushback on it, which I really thought I would at one point and I think Part of the reason I haven't gotten as much pushback as I would expect First such a claim. Oh, last me your bit is because Women actually think that it's good that they're like that, right? So To people who think academic freedom is obviously this really important thing and obviously science should be pursuing truth We look at these statistics and we're like like, well shit.
30:53Like this is really bad. Women are potentially causing problems in science and academia. But when women see these statistics, they're like, finally, like we're saving it. We're making it a safe place for everyone and we're making sure that science does good. It doesn't do harm. And there's another paper that looked at this, like the priorities of scientists, men are, they have this sort of like basic interest in understanding the world and like figuring out what's true and figuring out how things work, whereas women do science because they want to cause good in the world. So their motivation is, I want to know the truth, but I only want to know the truth if it's going to help me help other people, which means that any truth that doesn't help me help other people, and especially any truth that potentially could harm other people is not valuable, and we should not be pursuing it in science and academia, which is very fundamentally different from what I think a lot of people thought we were doing for a long time with science.
31:52The thing that I tried to get out earlier on before you side -swiped me with your misogyny was that I don't want this to come across like women haven't got their heads on straight, men you should treat them like they haven't got to clue what they're talking about. The point is if you were convinced of these viewpoints you would be convinced of them too. Like for the most part people are supporting things that they believe. Now they might believe them erroneously. It might be motivated reasoning. It might be because of societal pressure. It might be because they want to morally grandstand and look like they're really cool and important and empathetic and all this stuff.
32:29All of these reasons contribute. But like if I convince you that 2 plus 2 equals 4, you can't convince yourself of something that you're convinced of up until the point at which you are unconvinced at which point you have a new set of views, right? So it's like if you felt this way, if you had this biological predisposition, plus this sort of cultural imposition on you from all the girlfriends that you've spent time with, and the same for men too, like for the women in academia who say, I can't believe that men don't care about harms and blah, blah, blah. It's like the reason that they're convinced is because they're convinced.
33:01And being able to hold to conflicting viewpoints in your mind at one time is really important. Like, look, women can hold this view and to them it is the truth. Men can hold this view and to them it is the truth. Like, it's a case of trying to bridge that divide, I think, to help people understand, okay, from first principles, what are we trying to achieve? Right. With academia. Like, what's the goal here? What are we actually trying to get ourselves to ward? And I do think that it would lean more toward the male side of this. It's going to be toward the men. It's going to be truth. But... But do you just...
33:31One thing that I thought of... It's like, how do you just... Like, why? Like, how do you justify why science should be pursuing truth? Is it just a, is it just itself a good or is there a reason that we care about the truth or we should pursue truth? To me, the goal of science would be to accurately represent what is going on in the world. And why is that good? Why is that better than? Because that can inform decisions moving forward accurately. If you do it based on some predisposition, some sort of predetermination or some motivated reasoning, you're going to encounter a situation in which the world doesn't reflect what your research has supposedly shown or what missed research would have shown because you haven't been trying to represent what the world is.
34:20But why is that that? Because you're going to end up with massive errors. You're going to end up with people predicting things that don't come true or not predicting things that do come true that could have been discovered had the research been done. But why do you, why are errors bad? Why are errors bad? I guess that's a good question, because downstream, downstream from errors, you would end up with a world that isn't able, you would end up with a society and a civilization that isn't able to accurately perceive what is going on. That to me just seems like, what is science? if science isn't understanding what's happening in the world and downstream from that being able to accurately make predictions, I don't understand what we're doing here.
35:04Why don't we just write fiction? If that's the... I was trying to lead you down a path and you didn't take the bait. Bait me. What should I have said? Well, where I was going to try to get... I've seen myself do... I'm a person who thinks science should be pursuing truth, with the person foremost, and I don't think other moral concern should interfere with that, unless they're catastrophic and definitely gonna happen. But I find myself justifying that with consequences, which is if we don't have the truth, we're gonna waste all this time on these bullshit interventions that aren't gonna accomplish anything, they're not gonna deliver on their promises.
35:42They might actually cause harm to people. And so I'm like bringing in the harm element to justify why we should be pursuing the truth. But it sounds like you think truth is maybe just like in itself a good which I would like to argue that but I'm like well where does that value come from? Is it just like that's just something humans think because truth is tends to be useful and so we have come to sort of worship the truth. But when I try to justify it I go prevent harm. And then I'm doing the same thing, which is oddly what there what a lot of people are trying to do, but you're right they're going through a less secuative route.
36:19They're just saying, okay, we won't ever talk about anything that could harm somebody. And you're like, that's the first order effect. The second order effect might be that they end up being harmed because the thing that you've researched or not researched is the thing that could have protected them from the harm in the end. Yeah, I think I think I was really, really poorly talking about the implications on stream. I mean, just very badly. But it is interesting, because I assume you know of that L Shabley paper on the female mentors that got the authors' practice. That was like two, three summers ago, maybe right around now, during that summer, first summer of COVID, when everyone was going crazy.
37:00This young female scholar published this paper with a couple of colleagues and they found that female mentees of female mentors had less impactful careers later down their careers than male mentees that were mentored by male mentors. So essentially this male -male combo of mentor mentee led to more successful outcomes than this female female. Those people hated that obviously because it makes women look like they're not good mentors or something, or women aren't cooperating well together. And they retracted the paper. And this is one of the, and there was all of this talk about how this is gonna harm women in science, and it's gonna cause all these negative consequences.
37:47And what ended up happening is like the journal was like, we're gonna launch initiatives to help women in science, blah, blah, blah, blah. So if anything, it was like helpful to women that this paper got published. But then on the other side of it, I'm thinking, no scholar, let's imagine this effect is real, which I don't think we have a good reason to doubt it. No one really criticized finding, they criticized the operationalizations and stuff. Let's assume it's a true effect. Well, no scholar in the right mind is ever going to try to study it and figure out, why did we, why did this happen? Which means we'll never try to solve a problem because we don't acknowledge that the problem exists in the first place if there is a problem.
38:27And so yeah, like these concerns about harms to women in science, very, they definitely have potential to actually cause harm to women in science because we're ignoring potential disparity that potentially could be fixed by something. And we'll just never look for the thing that could fix it, you know. Two studies that come to mind for me there. One being about women with female bosses reporting lower levels of job satisfaction. and then a second one that looked at male academics being more reticent to collaborate with female academics post me too. Fucking hell. I mean, yeah, that's another thing is like it's hard to anticipate what the consequences of any one thing are going to be of any one scientific finding or any one social movement, you know.
39:26So like even if you think you're avoiding harm, you might also be creating harm and truth has taken a hit, you know. So like these aren't questions that are being studied empirically. These are just assumptions people have. people just assume this is going to be bad. But they don't bother to actually figure out if it's going to be bad. And if it is going to be bad, is that the only way it's going to be bad? Or is it going to be bad if you suppress the science? Like my big concern is I'm like people shouldn't trust science anymore. Like there's so much political bullshit going on that even if we thought it was for the right reasons for whatever progressive values scholars care about if they're successfully pursuing those.
40:10Well, they've undermined the institution of science and no one trusts us anymore because we look like a bunch of political hacks and it's true. I don't even think we can deny that that's what's happening. So I mean, some people try to, but you know, you can look at our shitty track record. If you look at like the replication crisis and all of the contradictions just being pumped out into the world day after day, it's a sad state of affairs. I think there's a really lovely framing, generally, for a lot of things that are going on within media that are pushing purposefully obfuscated truths or like outright lying about certain things that downstream from that there are second, third, fourth order effects that people aren't aware of that can be more harmful than an uncomfortable tasting medicine with a spoon of sugar to take it down.
41:04I think I remember the Chelsea Connovoi article from The New York Times, maternal instinct is a myth that men created. It's like, okay, that's, sure, that's an opinion, I suppose. It was backed up by some really shitty like very... Is it like they created it so that they wouldn't have to do parenting? It was to keep women under the thumb, I think, to keep sort of as domestic prostitutes might have been on the lines that was used. But my point being that like, okay, so maybe that is comforting to women who are from a particular cohort, the, you know, rear women who are doing these things. But it's very damaging to women who have them at an instinct.
41:42And now they think, oh, right, I've been fucking rubbed by the patriarchy and being marionetted by like, fucking Andrew Tate and Dan Bill's Aryan have got a hold of like what it is, like the way that I I show up in the world. So the actual real world harm of being trying to be overly sympathetic or empathetic towards disadvantaged groups. Yeah, I think it's a really, really nice framing that harm in the immediate avoiding immediate harm can cause much worse harm down the road and doing that also destroys truth and also kind of wrecks the entire scientific process. But what do you say to the people who would push back and say men and women are psychologically different because of patriarchy and social expectations and stuff we just need to nudge those change those in some way?
42:31Yeah, I mean some people try to claim that it's all environmental or cultural and some people try to claim that you know There aren't even men and women in the first place Or does it just humans or something? Yeah, I think some of the most compelling data there are that when you look in more egalitarian countries, you often see that actually these gender differences get bigger. And so when men and women are given more freedom to flourish and pursue what they want to pursue, you can see even bigger. Like women, a lot of, and this is related to what you were just saying, like a lot of women really like being a mom and staying home and taking care of their kids is the most meaningful thing to them.
43:12And then you get these scholarly career women who look down on them and shame them for making that choice. But when women have a partner who can support them because they're getting paid enough, they've got their healthcare needs taken care of, they're more likely to choose to stay home and be a mom. And it's in some of these really poor countries, our countries where women are treated really terribly where the women are going into STEM at really high rates. You know, so if it if if if it were going to if it were caused by these like really destructive social expectations that aimed to hold women down, I think we would see that places like Sweden and stuff, you know, women are becoming engineers at the same rate as men, but that's just not the case, and there's evidence that it's precisely the opposite of that that when women get to choose, They choose things that women would be interested in doing because they like evolved to be good at those things and it's really important for them.
44:13There's a interesting lesson I learned from Mary Harrington where the especially women at the top, the ones who create the culture of feminism in particular, don't have the interests of the women at the bottom in mind. So she used the example of reducing chivalry. Like, I don't need to be protected by a man. I don't need him to hold the door open for me. I don't need him to pull my chair out. I don't need him to pay for the first date, etc. Like, you know, this is the egalitarian. And it's a, again, you're holding up your morally grandstanding for a disadvantaged group. And you're almost presuming that hoping that they can take care of themselves, you're reducing dependency.
44:54But what those women at the top, the bourgeois sort of feminist believers members don't realize is that there are women at the bottom for whom their partner might not have had, might have grown up in a single parent household, might have been abused by a father. Like they could do with understanding protecting women, which is really what opening the door and pulling the chair out is about. It's like treating them in a more, a less robust way is upstream from don't hit your wife. Right? Just a little. Yeah, but the point of women are something that require protecting and providing for is something that can be dispensed where they're if you are part of some like high for leading class, but necessarily doesn't work down at the bottom.
45:33And it feels a little bit the same as what you're talking about here. There was this really, really great study that Alexander date spikes just put out. I'm going to bring him on to talk about in a couple of weeks. 55 % of single men haven't approached a woman in the last year, 77 % of women say that they were approached more, but that is in the 18 -30 age bracket. At 41 plus, the trend flips and 55 % of women said that they didn't want to be approached. Question being, who is writing all of the op -eds saying men stop approaching women? It's the women that are in that age bracket. The old way, yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:12So it's in there, are you saying, so it's the older women who are saying stop approaching women and it's the women who aren't getting approached. And so they're like taking out the competition, stop hitting on the 20 year old. Intersectional women and sexual competition is showing ladies. And they're the one liking that. I wonder that a lot with them. So one finding we see is that there was a, I asked a question of psychology professors, like should professors be fired for having sex with their students? And you see that men are more likely to say no. And women are like, yeah, they should be fired.
46:46And it's like, okay, on the one hand, maybe women are licking out for their own interests. They don't, you know, or maybe they're looking out for young women. They don't want women being harassed by these older professors. But also, maybe these older professors are like, we don't want our mating pool hooking up with the 24 -year -old grad students. So it's hard to tease these things apart. But yeah, a lot of the time there's this, and I'm sort of torn. And like I think there's probably some validity to both perspectives. Like on the one hand, women do have, especially women who are older and who have kids.
47:19They have these like maternal instincts and these desire to protect young people. At the same time, young women are also often their competitors for mates. So, you know, if you can prevent the 45 year old professor and their department, you're a 40 year old female professor and you're single, you don't want him dating the 28 year old grad student, you know? Yeah, there's two examples that I think about. One is a bill, Burbid, where he says, the reason that girls on average that women are more body positive is because they want their fat friends to not get skinny. So it's an intersectional competition all over again.
48:01I know you're beautiful as you are. Lose a toe, you fat bitch. Like that's his, that's this bit that he does throughout this like diabetic woman. And then I saw a study that suggested women, more, they slutshame more or they're more disparaging of like relaxed sexual standards if they have sons and the most sons that they have the more that that increases. They're more disparaging of relax sections for men or for women if they have a husband for women. I thought that was why I'm not sure I thought I just thought that was really interesting. I need to be I'm gonna say you might want the girls to be because then your son can have a lot of kids if the women are just handed it out.
48:47I wonder whether if you did do that the man is going to need to work harder to try and hold on to his partner he's basically got a less secure mate. That's true So like a woman who wouldn't necessarily be a good mom and help take care of the grandkids. Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. I find the whole like I often wonder why society doesn't sluts shame men more often because it seems like it would be really important to control male sexual behavior because they can do so much damage like as we were saying a woman can only have a handful of babies in her lifetime. A men can father hundreds of children and not take care of any of them, at least now, you know, depending where you live, you have to pay some pretty steep child support, but that wasn't always the case.
49:31And so I find it quite perplexing. If there's anyone who studies this topic, you should bring them on because I'm really curious to you. Put your brochines hat on and explain why you think there's this disparity in slut shaming. It could be because slut shaming is mainly happening for women against other women and men don't care that much about other men's sexual behavior because you know they they're only gonna monopolize a woman for like 10 minutes or whatever. So it might be that it's really and it might be that men only such a women a little bit because women do but women such a them more.
50:12So it could just be a female intersectional competition thing and and but I also think women could such a men but maybe they don't because men don't care about being such a so there's no point. There's no more people about all of the women that I'm sleeping with. Okay, so pre -selection, the fact that a man who is desired by multiple women is seen as desirable on average by more women. It's the reason why guys should have photos on their Tinder profile with them with other women because it shows that you're not like a total basement. Some women think I'm cool. Exactly, exactly. I'm not totally repulsive to women.
50:46and because of that, if a woman does start trying to call out a man's sexual exploits, because it is probably positive expected value on his status, it's a pointless thing. Like, if you think about what... Do you only make some look better? Yeah, exactly. But think about the insults that get thrown around on the internet. The first one from any woman or man to a woman is slut, and the first one from any man or woman to a man is cook or soy boy or in -salt. Right? So it's disparaging a lack of sexual chastity on one side and a lack of sexual experience on the other because those are the most valuable things That they have to offer.
51:24So yeah, that's really interesting But it is it's strange to me that we haven't somehow as a society managed to make it an insult to a man to call him a manhore But we haven't because I really do think like I'm like one or two percent Mongolian which I think must mean that Genghis Khan was my great great great great great great great great great great everybody in like the whole world Like why wouldn't we want to Handle of more of Genghis Khan discourage Someone from monopolizing that much of the the mating pool, but well you wouldn't exist if that was the case You wouldn't I guess I wouldn't so thank God.
52:04Yeah, this is the oddest type of euthanasia desire that I've ever heard in my entire life I wanted my genetic line to have ended 50 generations ago, please. I guess a lot of us wouldn't be here. What percentage of us are related? I'm insane percentage. Wasn't the repoint, you might know this, I don't know whether it's your field of expertise. Wasn't the repoint where there was like 8 ,000 homo sapiens left on the planet and we're all in Indonesia or some shit? We've gone through, I don't know all the specifics of it, but we have gone through some points where things were getting a little precarious and bounced back, apparently, so that's good.
52:38It's a little bottle like something. It's just maybe good for all the people who are paranoid about AI killing us all. Like, at least, you know, a few hundred of us can survive. Maybe we'll fight the rumors over us. So it's a few hundreds, a few hundreds that are sufficiently sociosexual. If you pick like the 200 least sociosexual people here, everyone's just gonna, now I'm gonna go and whittle myself something out of this tree and die on my own. We want it to be like a bunch of elderly people that would do us no good. Yeah. That would not be good. But evolutionary psychology, one of your areas of expertise, one of my areas of obsession.
53:11Why do you think it is that evolutionary psychology is so detested?
53:18Yeah, so this is the talk I give in HBS. And it was definitely not something that I was trying to discover. My purpose was to know why people hate evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics, which is the other one that people hate. But pretty much all of the controversial conclusions in psychology, the ones that will get you in trouble, they all kind of come from evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. And it's because people dislike conclusions that regard group differences, so gender differences or race differences specifically. And they especially don't like those conclusions if they're supported by an evolutionary explanation or behavioral genetic explanation, and those two kind of go hand in hand because evolution works on our genes.
54:08So I keep working out on my earbuds. So when it comes to the kinds of conclusions that are going to really irritate people, people are going to tend to be in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, and the kind they're really going to love are going to be in like social psychology. So it's all these every group differences caused by discrimination. every group differences is caused by like cultural expectations of people. You know, men and women are no different if it weren't for the fact that we make girls wear pink and make them take ballet class. Whereas evolutionary psychologists are like, no, there are very good reasons to expect that men and women would be evolved without different bodies, which they do have, and different brains, which they do have that lead to different, you know, general personality differences.
54:55And then people specifically, or especially hate these differences, if, as we were talking about, the start of this conversation, if the differences favor men over women, or if they favor specifically white people over black people. So if there's anything where white people are outperforming black people or men are outperforming women, and then you provide an evolutionary or genetic explanation for that, those are the kinds of things I didn't get you fired. They're going to get your paper retracted and people are going to call you all kinds of names. So yeah, evolutionary psychology is kind of screwed, I think, especially as things move toward this, let's be careful and avoid the potentially harmful topics as women take over academia.
55:39You would think that people are going to become more accepting of evolutionary psychology because they kind of have been for a little while, but we might be at a turning point and it might actually become. I think it's actually quite likely to, yeah. Wouldn't that be a shame if there's been all of this time spent with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology kind of dispensing some of the slime that maybe it had accumulated or was thrown at it and slowly over time. You know, if you want to avoid the replication crisis, you places one tree or an evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics.
56:14It's so true, yeah. But the two places that haven't been slammed by... place you don't want to be a social psychology. Yeah, the least reliable of all of the different psychology disciplines has been the one, which is currently the most on the rise, the one that is politically, emotionally the most upheld in order to be able to support. Yeah, it's very, very backward, but it would be a shame if we've done all of that work, you know, you and your field have done all of this work to get it to the stage where it's regarded in relatively neutral light for a, what did we call it? the academic, the academic, this academic sex ratio hypothesis, what the fuck did you do all of that?
56:51Yeah. Gender ratio, gender ratio hypothesis, whatever. So you tried to work this out. You tried to do a study about taboos and censorship. And for this, you tried to recruit every psychology professor in the US. At the top 130 institutions, yeah. I tried. I only got like 10 or 11 % of them, but so it was like about 500 people. Quite a lot. Yeah. Kind of quite a lot. And we see these, my favorite one. So after I interviewed, I interviewed around 40 or so and asked them like, what are the most controversial conclusions? And that's how I discovered. It's these types of conclusions with these differences.
57:28And if they have evolved, people really don't like those conclusions. But then I asked a follow -up sample of these like around 500 people. Their views about these conclusions. And one of them is that men and women when you've all different psychological characteristics. And a finding we see across all of the conclusions, but this one is the most entertaining, is that men are pretty sure that that conclusion is true. And women are like very on the fence about it. So the mean for women is closer to the midpoint, whereas men are sort of clustered toward the top of the scale. And so we see across all controversial conclusions that men think they're more likely to be empirically correct, whereas women are more likely to think that they're false.
58:15And then we see that the people who think that they're true are self -sensoring more, which inevitably means that what we hear publicly about controversial conclusions is systematically distorted. and the impression is that these bad controversial conclusions are false and they're fringe and no one believes they're true. People believe they're true. It's just they won't talk about it out loud. So it really distorts the perception of scientific consensus anytime you get like one of these one of these conclusions that Pat has potential to get you in trouble. And then we looked at like all these kinds of things.
58:51For example, I asked professors, Imagine a scholar who forwards an evolutionary genetic explanation for a group difference that favors men over women or white people over black people. What should happen to a scholar who would forward such a conclusion? And across the board we see gender differences here, whereas female psychology professors are more likely to support ostracizing them, calling them racist or sexist or bigoted, shaming them on social media, not publishing their work even if it has merit, not hiring them, even if they meet typical standards. And so women, like their moral concerns, will make them, which is sort of strange, because I think men might be slightly more punitive than women in general.
59:40But in this particular context, women are more punitive across the board toward their peers who for controversial conclusions are conclusions that they don't like because they perceive them as potentially like morally bad. So yeah, I'm quite worried for the future of science, at least the version of it that I thought was what we were doing. But it just might completely transform into something quite different. Maybe that'll be good. I don't know. Have you got any idea how supporting or not supporting groups are if you were to give a behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology explanation for racial or sex differences between groups that favored women or favored minorities?
1:00:30So I didn't ask that one because it was not, so actually it was specifically mentioned is not controversial. So when I interviewed the first round of psychology professors, they were like, well, it's only controversial if the conclusion favors men over women, it's only controversial if it favors white people over black people. And so it's really this like particular kind. It's it's conclusions that have potential to portray groups that are perceived as vulnerable or disadvantaged. If you portray them more negatively than the group that is perceived as powerful or vanished. It was essentially white men.
1:01:05So you can publish things about white men being bad at something, but you can't publish things about other groups. Would they be happy with that being a behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology explanation, do you think? Yeah, that's a good question. I reckon they wouldn't. I reckon they wouldn't for the reason that that opens the door to a different piece of research. The easiest way to do this is to de -legitimize all of behavioral genetics and all of evolutionary psychology can't blanche, because downstream, like the presumption is that this has been used previously in a farious way, or this could be used in a politically inconvenient way, even if it's real.
1:01:43So if we just say that this is off the table, I would guess that on average, you're going to find that basic behavioral genetic and evolutionary psychology explanations, even if they do favor underrepresented groups are gonna be pushed away. I think those would be less controversial, but I think you're right that they still would be somewhat controversial because people would fear the legitimizing the the approach to the question. So for example, some people seem to not like that, you know, if you look at the NBA in the United States. That's overwhelmingly African Americans playing in the NBA in the United States.
1:02:23They're vastly disproportionately represented. And so some people said, well, you know, because of different evolutionary pressures, a group of different, or you know, evolved in different environments, this caused different body structures. And so you provide an evolutionary explanation, well, black men are better at basketball than white men on average. And there is some resistance to that. And I think it's because of the implication that there are differences, right? And then it makes sense that there would be differences given that different populations you've all been different climates. So yeah, I think it would be less controversial, but it still would be controversial, especially for people who are like sort of savvy, you know, like, well, if I commit to this, what else am I potentially committing to?
1:03:06So yeah. Okay, so you found there was four of these most taboo conclusions that you found. Many women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution. Biological sex is a binary for the majority of people. The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior, likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior. And gender biases are not the most important drivers of the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Like those, that's like, that's all headlines that I've read for the last two years fall into one of those buckets.
1:03:45Those are four of the 10. There are other ones related to race as well. And then there are other ones related to politics. So just even the idea that psychology discriminates against conservatives. Some people mentioned or the idea that academia, you know, if it doesn't discriminate against black people, what does that say? So sorry, that's that's an interesting one. I didn't know about the conservative side. But what's interesting there is that conservatives aren't an underrepresented group. So they are. Oh, they are in psychology, not in the world. Yeah, but that's the point, right? So in the world, it's not like it's not like conservatives as some maligned group that have needed to be upheld morally.
1:04:26So that one, to me, screams much more about motivated reasoning that if you poll academics on average, especially now, modern academia, they're leaning pretty hard left. So that's just like out group tribal bias. Yeah, people have been debating that when some people say that it's just conservatives aren't good at science, or they just don't like science. But there have been other studies in bar and lammers, and academics will straight up say that they would discriminate against conservatives and hiring and talking bites and things like that. So there's good reason to believe people are just discriminating against conservatives.
1:05:05Scott Galaway taught me, maybe it's a third or 50 % of Democrat parents fear that their child will marry a Republican. Yeah, the Ingrid out group hatred with the political thing is really huge. And people just admit it. They don't even feel ashamed, right? If you track, if you track political bias against racism, like people are way more politically racist than they are racially racist by a huge, I take by lots of lots of multiples. Yeah, it's true. That's true. And yet we don't care as much about that one for some reason. What's the interesting thing there is that your politics tell me a lot more about you than your race.
1:05:50They tell me more about your world, at least how you show up in the world probably than your race. It's the same reason in the UK that, again, people are more prejudiced against those with different accents and those with different skin colors. This is a study that was done that was really interesting. And quite rightly, like somebody walks into a room that is of a different race to you, but speaks in a similar accent, you have an awful lot more in common with that person than someone who walks into the room with the same skin color as you, but a different accent. Right. Because especially, especially in the UK and I learned this from someone who was British, the UK has got such a rigid class system.
1:06:25And accent denotes an awful lot of that class. So I can tell is somebody from an area that's similar to me or different than me. So we played this game. I went to a retreat a couple of weeks ago in LA and there was one other British guy there. And we were talking about like a similar sort of thing. And this guy had like, it's quite a nice, it's Ed from like, he's a YouTuber. And he's got a nice British accent. I think he grew up in the Cotswolds, which is like quite a fancy sort of countryside place. And the guys are like, what class do you think he is? like tell me what you know about him just based on the way he speak.
1:06:59I hadn't met this guy before and I was able to pin him down to pretty much the region he was in, the class that he grew up in. I knew that he went to private school. I knew that he was university educated. I knew this, this, and this, and this, just from the way that he spoke. So again, with this, like, you're, there are many things that are more informative about who somebody is than this in color. And yet that was originally 50 years ago, one of the goals of the sort of racial justice movement to try and get us to the stage where skin colour kind of was dispensed and moved to the side. And now it's been put front and centre again.
1:07:38And as despite the fact that it is not a particularly reliable signal of lots and lots of things about the way that people show up in the world. Yeah, it is interesting we appear to have gone like a little bit. But there are even some people advocating for racial segregation on both sides. Well, on both sides. I think it was NYU is considering having all black dorms, which is one thing. But then there was another one where this group of white people were like, no black people can attend this meeting about racism because they've had to put up with our shit too much as it is. We can't subject them to us.
1:08:16Surely not. And you're like, what? You do realize how this sounds. So backwards. Yeah. Yeah, it is strange. I loved in England for two years. And I was very surprised by how front and center class is there in a way that it's not so much. Like when people describe people, they often will like, oh, they're very posh or whatever. And like in the US, it would be really off putting to be like, oh, they're like super rich. And they have a great house. You know, like you wouldn't say that. Yeah. I really, really good point. Yeah, the, that's, but I think it might be because you guys don't have as much racial diversity.
1:08:52So this is like more of a defining thing for you guys. Not many black people. Lots of Indian people, lots of Pakistani people, like some Chinese people, but not we just don't have that same sort of split. I remember this was a little while ago now that they were trying to do graduation ceremonies and they timetable the graduation ceremonies. It's like, this is the Hispanic ceremony and this is the black ceremony and this is the white ceremony. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh gosh. And no high school or something. Have you seen Ryan Long, he's a Canadian comedian, and he did a famous video about three years ago that was racists and danti -racists who were on everything, and him and his friend Danny wore the same t -shirt, and it was like, we believe that the most important thing is your skin color.
1:09:34Yes, and they'll pick it high five. They go, we believe that black children and white children should not be educated together. Yes, they keep on agreeing on shit. So good. Yeah. I did see that. That was really funny. And it is strange that it's slightly accurate, at least in some groups of people. Yeah. Okay. So going back to your study, this one where you tried to get every fucking psychology professor in all of the US, what did the professors say about how to handle potentially harmful conclusions? Yeah. So that one... So I've been talking about these gender differences, but I should say like if I look across all of my data, mostly people do support academic freedom and mostly people are against taking these moral concerns into consideration when deciding whether to publish something.
1:10:23So I had a question, how certain, yeah, how certain should it be that a finding is going to cause harm before it was suppressed? And I think the most common response was we should never suppress scientific findings. And then there was like a little bit for like high tears, like there should be evidence that the only way to prevent the harm is to suppress the finding. And you get almost nobody down at the bottom, which is like something like there should be, it should seem like it could cause harm or something like that. And the reason to me that is semi puzzling is because those nature springer guidelines I was talking about earlier that very much seems to be their threshold.
1:11:03Their threshold seems to be like, if it seems like it could cause harm, then we will reject or retract papers. But almost no psychology professors think that that is the appropriate place to draw the line. Like, a few people in my whole entire sample. And so that makes me wonder like, how is it that the perception of where the field is going and what people want is actually what what the extremists want. And is it that the extremists are like trying to get these positions of power to influence policy, which seems quite possible to me. Like if you're really motivated, maybe you're like, I'll do that job, even though I don't think being an editor would be all that much fun.
1:11:45But you got a lot of power. Is that happening or is it disproportionate representation in terms of just how loud they are online? Yes. So that's another thing is I think that because we have this relationship with self -sensorship, it's the people who support academic freedom in pursuit of truth and who think controversial social conclusions might be true and we should publish them. Those are the ones who are self -sensoring and it's the ones who are really concerned about the harms and think that we should be firing people and retracting papers. They're very willing to say what they think out loud and on social media.
1:12:17So I think there's just this distortion of what people want because so many of us are too scared to say anything. And it allows people who are are in this vocal minority, and that's a small minority, small minority. They can make these bold policy changes, and not that many people will put up a fight, a few people have complained, but a lot of people who disagree with them aren't saying anything. They're staying out of it, because they're scared, because they don't want to be the next one with the target on their back. What's the implication of this? Like we've got, you know, this milieu of hypersensitivity.
1:12:59Millio. I speak French. I've always wanted to drop that into it, but it just never happened. Watch me in front of you. Yeah, like you said, there's this ambient background. We are concerned about these kinds of harms to pretty reliably robust areas of research that are being thrown to the side and maligned. What's the, what are the implications of this? Or what did you, after having conducted the study and then looked at the data and realized, holy fuck, what's going on? Like, what did it make you reflect on or what did it make you think? Well, part of my motivation for running this study in the first place was just because I had the strong suspicion that this was exactly what was happening because I, because I'm sort of like, I'll talk openly about these issues, at least more openly than a lot of people will.
1:13:49most people will. People will come to me and like complain to me about stuff but they don't say anything out loud. So I know all of these people who don't like the way things are headed, they think these new policy changes that are prioritizing harms, over science, are bullshit and they won't say it to each other but they'll say it to me. You're a safe space for bigotry. That's what I'm saying. I understand. Let's make that the clip of a video. I have space for big a tree, Corey Clark, PhD. Thank you. So I knew all of these people were afraid, but I was like, I actually am kind of curious, what is the true majority perspective or rather like how off am I in relation to other people?
1:14:33And then once I saw the results, I was like, wow, that's even more than I expected. I didn't realize like this many people were this against what's happening like we had a question This was my favorite question, I think on the whole survey, which was how much Contempt versus admiration and respect you have toward professors who start petitions or social media campaigns to attract papers for moral reasons And on a zero to a hundred scales zero being maximum contempt to a hundred maximum admiration respect the modal response was zero so like people people really hate these people. And I wouldn't know it from hanging out on Twitter.
1:15:11Like a lot of them are signing the petitions and they're certainly not like shaming the people. I mean, some people are, but most people aren't. Most people are just staying quiet or even participating. So I was quite surprised at how one direction... How would Lee? Yeah, how cowardly. How cowardly everyone's being. But what I think is potentially interesting about that is it suggests there's a lot of preference falsification going on, which is I think Timur Khrur on I'm probably pronouncing my name wrong, his concept. But what's he going to explain that? So preference falsification is essentially when people publicly are saying that they believe or support something that they don't actually truly believe or support.
1:15:56And when you have that, when you have all these people essentially lying to protect themselves, protect their jobs or other reputations or whatever, you create a situation that's really precarious. Because if people get information, and specifically it's that they think their views are the minority and so they don't say anything. If those people find out that their views aren't the minority, that their views are actually the majority, all of a sudden they might be more willing to speak out. So I do think it creates this possibility that if I ever get this paper published, we'll see. Then suddenly all of these psychology professors are going to be like, oh, a lot of people feel the way I feel.
1:16:36Maybe it's okay for me to say this thing at this faculty meeting. Maybe it's okay for me to say this thing on Twitter or at the business meetings at these professional conferences. Because a lot more people are on their side than they previously thought. So yes, people are being cowardly and that irritates me a little bit because sometimes I feel like people will thank me for staying stuff. And I'm like, well, you say, like don't free ride on my, you know, reputational risk taking. But at the same time, those people potentially under the right circumstances could get a little bit more courage and speak up.
1:17:15And things actually could change quite rapidly if they did. I don't know if that will happen. Again, I have these conflicting views where I'm like, am I an optimist or am a pessimist? I'm an optimist because I think so many people are lying essentially about what I'm going what they think is best for science. And if I could give them courage and speak up and they all spoke up at once, then that could have a huge impact. On the other hand, because we see all these gender differences and women are taking over academia, the numbers are only gonna be shifting that way for the foreseeable future. There's no hope, I think, at this point or no reason to believe anyway.
1:17:50That things are gonna be shifting, back toward male males aren't even going to to undergrad that much anymore. So the pool of potential men that could become professors is getting smaller, smaller by the day. So what's that called about demography as destiny? It's like a university intake as destiny. You're not going to create male professors out of a non -male undergraduate pool. And especially because in the fields that are dominated by women, people aren't particularly concerned about getting more men in. Whereas in the fields that are dominated by men, like some of the hard stem fields and then like philosophy, they're desperately trying to get more women.
1:18:33So there's all the social pressures are still pulling that way. So you know, the male academic is gonna be a rare breed in maybe like 20 years. I'm going to the sex ratio hypothesis. I'm telling you. I'm gonna get intense. You're gonna be swimming in it. So the two main takeaways from the presentation that I watched you give it at Palm Springs a couple of months ago. So, should scholars be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their conclusions? 60 % of women said it's complicated, 60 % of men said yes. And if pursuit of truth and social equity goals appear to come into conflict, which should scientists prioritize, 50 % of women said it's complicated and 70 % of men said yes.
1:19:17Those were the two ones that stood out for me. Yeah, that's again, it's the same thing. It's these majorities, right? Like, whichever group is in the majority is going to get their thing. I mean, so one thing is women won't say, well, for the most part, women don't say social equity should take priority over truth or, you know, scholars should be punished, but they say it's complicated. Which just indicates that they have this like trade off that they think they're making between, Well, yeah, we want truth a lot of the time, but not in these cases, not in the when when results potentially could Cause harm to a group or could spread I mean one concern that a lot of people have is just spread negative stereotypes.
1:20:00It's like How bad is that? Is the spreading of a negative stereotype like if there are no actual consequences like do we know for sure that spreading negative Stereotypes causes people to do horrible things to other people like Is it okay if people have slightly negative seritites? Like the magnitude of the harm we're talking about, it's not like gain of function research. We're like, well, if we do this, we might kill all of the humans or research on nuclear warheads or something. If we do this, we might blow up the world. It's like we might make some people have slightly more negative attitudes towards certain people.
1:20:45It's just the magnitude of the harm that's being considered to me feels.
1:20:54Miniscule, like potentially not even harmful in the first place like, like give me something concrete, you know, and give me some proof. Show me like that publishing this paper that, you know, mentor male students better than women mentor female students. Like, show me the harm there. There wasn't any. And also incorporate the downstream consequences of not accurately identifying it. Didn't you say that you got reported for doing this study? I did. I did. I forgot about that. So I did this study. I got IRB approval. You always have to get IRB approval. So that's just, and there was a consent form.
1:21:36People knew what I was asking. I said I'm asking about the most controversial conclusions and psychology that were nominated by your peers in this other survey.
1:21:45And one of the, so my IRB emailed me and they're like, we received a complaint from one of your participants. You don't have to do anything. You didn't do anything wrong. You did have IRB approval, but we are obligated to share the complaint, the synonymous complaint with you. And she said, and I'm assuming it's a she, I don't know for sure. You slipped up, you slipped up, you bitch, you son of a bitch. This is based on accurate base rates. But she said that the questions were jarring to her. And then she thought they would be even more jarring to underrepresented groups in psychology. And that this was not my first offense.
1:22:29Serial biggest. I've got some enemies out there. but fortunately I followed the procedure so she didn't get to shut me down. But she tried to. Well, what's really fascinating there? And I think this, I've been trying to weave together a single thread between all the stuff that we've gone through today, which I think is, it's a single narrative, right? Everything that we've spoken about this gamma bias, or as you called it, the lack of prescience of patriarchal misogyny, then this change in academia skewing toward women and the downstream implications. And then finally, what this means that the academic, how it's influencing academic research itself too.
1:23:12The single thread between it all and it really gets shown up in that potential ladies concern is a supposed sort of parochialness and concern for underrepresented groups. It's almost like everybody is shadow boxing against an imaginary hegemon. That like, do you know what I mean? It's like it's not for me. I am okay with this, probably. What I'm doing is I am going to step out and I'm going to be the benevolent, sort of counterweight against this thing that I presume. So it is, it's a very overbearing, very sort of fri - Eternalistic, but it's maternalistic. But it's not caring, right? It's not the firm sort of mother, it's the overbearing hypersympathetic helicopter, Snowplum, parent mother.
1:24:08But yeah, it's really seeing people, especially disadvantaged groups, in just such a unrobust fragile way. And if you actually think about it, that's really, really fucking prejudiced to go, you know, these poor black people, they can't. They're not going to be these poor women, these poor minorities, these poor gaze, they're not going to be able to handle this. Don't you worry. Allow me, white 48 year old woman who hasn't left academia in three decades, allow me to step in. You don't know what's right for you. you don't know what should be done, I will be your savior. I tend to see that the people who are the most forceful on the other side of things, the ones who are trying to take these harm concerns more seriously and fuse academia with all these moral values, they do, and this is not based on my research, although possibly I could look at it, I should do that.
1:25:11But it seems to be driven by progressive white women who grew up like wealthy. They grew up, they were very well off. They never suffered in their life. And well, I shouldn't say that, I don't know what their personal backstory is, but it's these upper and middle class white, highly educated progressive women. And they, yeah, they think they're protecting other people. It's not about them. It's about these other vulnerable groups. And it is quite strange. So there are a couple of papers that actually look at very similar things. Like for example, there are these papers that find that progressives essentially like talk down to black people.
1:25:57They present less self -confidence when they're talking to black people. Whereas conservatives will treat black and white people more similarly. There's this other paper that was looking at, I think it was looking at like what jokes are funny or offensive or something. And you see that conservatives are like, make fun of everyone. They're all funny. We're all targets of these things. Whereas, progressives are like, can't make fun of minority groups. Make fun of everyone else, but don't make fun of them. And it is like, depending on your perspective, you can view this as pretty infantilizing, right?
1:26:32It's essentially implying that these people are so weak that they can't handle the same kind of, you know, I don't want to call it abuse, but like poking fun that other people can or that they can't handle like getting criticism or whatever it is, it does look a little bit like precisely what we were trying to avoid. Like at one point we thought we were working toward, well let's try to treat people equally. And now it's like, no, let's, we have to treat certain people better than other people because they can't handle what other people are getting. Yeah, so I personally find it a little bit off -putting, but I assume some people think that that is the kind thing to do.
1:27:16We need to come up with a name for it. It's like fake sympathy or fake virtue, because it seems to me to be primarily done to make the person bestowing the virtue look good not to have genuine impact. Because if it was built to have genuine impact, you would just look at what is the impact of this thing? You would look at the consequences or the implications of doing this thing. Oh, well, you know, the first order harm is X, but the second order and third order harms are 10 and 100 X. So we need to actually do things in this way. Maybe it's a prioritization of like immediate emotions in a world where people's opinions and beliefs are more important than like real worlds, harms and facts.
1:28:00Thank you for having me. Yeah, exactly. That might be another thing. Oh, who is, oh, is this a friend of mine, Maya Grasso, she's telling me about a paper. I was just at a conference in Poland. And she has this really interesting finding where she finds that, and I forget how she measured it, but it was men are the protector of external harm or physical harm, and women are the protectors of internal harm. So like men will step up when they see someone else suffering physical damage, whereas women are particularly compelled to stand up to protect someone who is suffering like psychological or emotional damage Which is really I think kind of Profounded what we see to be happening is like in fact, it's almost happening at the expense of potential physical harms is like women are so protecting of people's feelings that they they don't necessarily seem to consider all of these other as you're saying second order third order.
1:28:57What are the real things that can actually happen in the world? Because there's this deep concern with people's like psychological well -being.
1:29:09Yeah, forget where I was going with that. I've got my current worldview when it comes to self improvement. Marries exactly with this, I think, which is that male self -improvement sees the person as mutable and the world as immutable. So you need to be the best person possible and you need to accept the rules and the environment that you're in. It's in contrast to female self -improvement, which sees the person as immutable and the world as mutable. So women are taught to accept yourself and try and change these support structures and the society that you're in, which is just fundamentally patronizing.
1:29:43Right? It's that you see this in Mulan, the two versions of Mulan, I like it like we get Disney reference. When Mulan was first done, the protagonist is a smaller girl who needs to be smarter and work harder and do all of this is the animated version like 20 years ago. She needs to do all of these things to be able to compensate for her size and because she works really, really hard and is innovative, she can use her lack of size to her advantage and she's quicker and trained and she overcomes challenges and her age, she's brilliant. contrast that with the most recent version of Milan where this protagonist doesn't have to do anything.
1:30:19She is patronized by all of the men that are there. She's naturally better than all of the men. She doesn't have to overcome any challenges. She's got this like magical feminine sheet, estrogen sheet or whatever that allows her to be more talented than all of the men and all of the men are blundering and patronizing and blah blah. And that is the, it tracks the trajectory. The same with that. Did you watch the first one is probably directed by a man in the second one was probably directed by a woman? You think? No, no, no, no, no. I'm throwing out a hypothesis. Mulan, director. Or would be a writer.
1:30:53Would it be the writer or the black man? Who has more power? Oh my god. Directed by Nikki Caro. If NA, N .I. Nikki Caro is that... It's a woman. New Zealand film director. It's a fucking... Was the first one a man? Let me see. Yes, directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroff, the 99 -year -old version. That's, it has been proved. Wow. Wow, that's accurate and terrifying. Yeah, well, they've got different priorities and this is going to reveal itself and kind of whatever they do. It's really sort of interesting. I should be making predictions about other disciplines. You really should just FYI Mulan the 2020 film the budget was 200 million in the box office was 70 million so that's a heavy heavy price to 130 million to uphold women's fragility there that's so funny but look it's so he's a perfect example of that right because of some of the evolutionary psychology underpinnings and the research that you've done you have been able to accurately predict what's going on in the world.
1:32:10Right? That is a useful skill to be able to have. Right? Had we have not been able to learn about some of the predispositions that men and women have, you wouldn't have been so accurate. So what we're doing is we're expediting our progress towards something which is useful. And yeah, basically you're like a clairvoyance savant. We should try and have more of you. Cory Clark, ladies and gentlemen, Cory, I love your work. I think that all the stuff you're doing is fascinating. What should people expect next? What are you working on now that you can talk about? A lot of things. Let's see. I have a paper on politicization coming out, which is another one that's slightly surprised me because we see that everyone hates when institutions get politicized, even people who share the values of the institution.
1:32:55So like liberals don't want science which leans left to be politicized. So that's fun. I'm trying to get adversarial collaborations popularized in science. I'm trying to get scientists to work with their enemies. Another one where there's been a gender difference. I've most men I've approached have said yes and most women I've approached have said no. And I think it's because women are more averse to like interpersonal conflict and so there but but maybe if they become a norm than women will. And also I'm trying to be like they're not as scary as you think they are because they're really not. They tend to go really well.
1:33:31So those are, yeah, those are two things. I don't know. Why should people go? They want to check out more of the things that you do read your stuff. Yeah, I have a website, corijclark .com. I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I'm hard -corey, which was a pun that no one gets. I got it. You got it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Maybe if people don't know my name's Corey so that's probably a really key component. Yeah perhaps look or I really appreciate you thank you very much for having me on this was a lot of fun.
From the publisher
Cory Clark is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a social psychologist and an author.
Academia is supposed to be a bastion of intellectual purity where curiosity and the truth reign supreme. But what happens when the findings of research start to become inconvenient? What happens when conclusions may be scientifically accurate, but politically incorrect?
Expect to learn what happens when you conduct a study on self-censorship in academic psychology and get reported for it, whether pervasive misogyny is actually a myth, why there is such an apparent anti-female bias, how women have fundamentally changed the culture of academia, whether men are psychologically different because of the patriarchy, which two areas of psychology are the most hated by academia and much more...
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